Personal posts here.
Is understanding helpful?
April 29, 20122012.04.29
Recently, I am feeling frameless. I’m not able to be frameless, of course, no human can, yet — that’s the feeling. Perhaps I am unable to prefer a frame, privilege it above others. I wonder, does it do any good to understand things, or to try to understand things?
Not that a I have a choice, it’s a construction feature for me. Yet — other than the pleasure of it, when it happens — to what end? Reconciliation of pain with love?
Perhaps a reason for feeling frameless is the sense that except for the simplest things, “understanding” is simply a resolution point over a sea of non-understandable currents and tides — as though, for a time, the waves eddy and swirl in such a way there is a calm point in their midst — for a moment. Thus is understanding; or so it seems to me, right now.
Because I was raised by a couple who both, for different reasons, urgently wanted a normal life, who understood the description clearly but were unprepared to feel such a life, I grew up immersed in conventional forms that were only faintly occupied. So, perhaps as a consequence, I assume that the visible, perceivable features I can (dimly) see are only loosely tethered to the layers below. And, those layers are elastically tethered to one another, as well.
But what does that thought do? Perhaps that’s the developmental genesis; or, perhaps not. Perhaps it was something completely different, invisible to me. Does it help me see the colors outside my window? Breathe? Listen and hear? Love? I do not understand understanding.
Subtle and hard to track
June 25, 20112011.06.25
I read (Condan et al., PNAS 108, 2011) that with the broad demise of large ocean predators (human predation, human-caused acidification) jellyfish are increasing greatly. Far fewer sea turtles and big fish to eat them. With disruption of ocean ecosystems, we’re seeing more phytoplankton blooms. These now invite (and correlate with) jellyfish blooms. The jellies grab the smaller fishes. In research in the Chesapeake Bay, their ‘droppings,’ jelly-DOM (dissolved organic matter), are food for an otherwise uncommon bacteria. The bacteria is rare because they’re not as efficient as other bacteria, but apparently they’re particularly well-adapted to the low-nitrogen/high-carbon jelly-DOM. “Not as efficient” is the rub. They emit (respire into the atmosphere) between 45% and 73% of the carbon they consume, rather than recycling it (being eaten) or sequestering it (falling to the seafloor).
Meaning, until acidification gets them, increased CO2 emission from the oceans.
It’s so complicated and intertwined and difficult to predict. (That does not mean the climate models are “wrong”–they’re amazingly right, in general.) It does mean we’ll continually discover feedbacks that we didn’t, and couldn’t have, anticipated.
It also means, paradoxically, that things right in front of us are missed. Since 1980, climate change has reduced world food output about 3% a year. Since in the US we waste about 40% of our agricultural production–thinking about this is, for me, like being hit, hard, in the head with a bamboo rod–it may seem this is down in the noise. But it’s equivalent to about a hundred eighty thousand children starving to death a year, for the past thirty-one years. That’s in addition to children losing parents to starvation. Or being stunted. Or–well, I needn’t go on.
What debt we owe to the past; what debt we owe our children; what debt, what huge debt, we owe our grandchildren.
Evils of Meth
May 10, 20112011.05.10
Caloric restriction prolongs life, and in particular prolongs healthy life. Mice, rats, dogs, people, it seems to work. However, the downside is that it requires caloric restriction. Research by a team in Spain has found that it may be the case that restriction of methionine, an amino acid (protein), may give a large proportion of the effects of caloric restriction without that annoying ‘restriction.’
Their work was done on rats, not people, and they used a “proxy measure,” which means they looked at what causes damage but did not keep their rats going for long rat-lives. The measure was ROS (reactive oxygen species) in mitochondria. Mitochondria are every runner’s friend, the little guys inside our cells who make us able to burn oxygen to produce energy. And cutting methionine reduced “oxygen radical generation and leak” and oxidative damage to mitochondrial DNA. I have no idea what “leak” means in the context, but it’s hard not to like it. (“Quick! Call a mitochondrial plumber!”)
When the research team followed up, they did two things. First, they confirmed their earlier work by varying the restriction on methionine and seeing the greater restriction had a stronger (positive) effect. Second, the supplemented the rat’s diet with more methionine. With that, they found increased levels of damage.
Pretty cool.
Methionine is a kind of protein, which we use, but… of course… It’s complicated. Because proteins are mixed, because how the protein is prepared (oxidation in cooking alters how its metabolized), everything that comes with eating, and everything else in your life…
Well, no simple answer. Eating raw onions (high in methionine) may well shorten your life, but it’s more likely to be your fellow airplane passengers and not mitochondrial damage that does it. No magic. (Unless it turns out, with further research, that there is.)
Potential threat and ovulation
May 2, 20112011.05.02
A set of study subjects were arbitrarily divided into three groups. Each got a different colored teeshirt. The researchers wanted to test the degree to which group identification and implicit threat followed arbitrary difference. And what they found was that young women near ovulation were measurably less generous to male, other-teeshirt-color experiment participants. There was no effect on generosity to other women, or to same-shirt-color males.
The women were not aware they were doing this, but they did. They were not being threatened, and they didn’t do it when they were luteal. It reminds me of a recent study finding the elevated estrogen levels in males were associated with a stronger propensity to territoriality and out-group (“us versus them”) violence.
Meanwhile, the significant news of the week was the release of a new AMAP report reporting the much-faster-than-predicted Arctic melting. They now see an (up to) 1.6m sea level rise in 90 years. I picture Cabrillo: everything up to the train station is gone, or going. No more line of ocean-facing hotels. No East Beach at all, the Harbor perhaps relocated to the SBCC track. Someone just bought a $32 million place on Padaro Lane. They have time to enjoy it, unless the heavier atmospheric loading of water vapor (about 4% more worldwide than 1990) means that the hurricanes that form off Baja every year gain enough strength to move north. Not likely; the islands should protect us from that, anyway. The good news is that if we work at it we may be able to manage water. We saw during the seven-year drought we can do it.
Conservative and proud!
April 26, 20112011.04.26
Speaking as a Conservative, I can say with unshakable assurance, to solve the problem of climate destabilization, we need only unleash… Market Forces!
Let’s get the ball rolling!
> Hey, let’s cut out this government insurance thing in Florida! The State of Florida is the catastrophic insurer its Atlantic coast. After Hurricane Andrew, and of course those danged climate models the insurance company hippies follow, private insurance withdrew. Left! But why should the government pick up the slack? Let Market Forces drop Florida real estate prices until people can buy houses outright, with cash (since the banks wouldn’t lend), and — no more problem!
> Enough with the Big Government Nanny State and happy handouts to whomever whines the loudest! The Federal Govt gave seventeen thousand million dollars to various renewable energy developments last year! Can you believe it? Time for Market Forces! Cut those subsidies! (Also, the seventy-two thousand million in subsidies to oil companies, and the at loopholes that let Exxon pay zero taxes this year, and a fair market price on the military policing services around Saudi Arabia and in Iraq to maintain the flow of oil.)
> Enough so-called “kickstarting” of loser technologies that can’t make it in the market on their own! Market Forces! An immediate end to the Federal Govt insurance of nuclear power. If they can’t buy insurance on the open market, let ‘em close up! This is the 21st century Market!
Next week: Market Forces tackle hydropower!
Probability
April 11, 201120110411
Kathryn Schultz reviewed the latest entry in the “all the experts are wrong” genre recently in the NT Times book review. When Paul Krugman panned the Republican committee on climate change for having a marketing professor testify, the aggrieved professor wrote back that experts are wrong and he was right about everything (especially about how wrong experts are).
There’s a simple heuristic. The closer to physics and chemistry things are, the more accurate the predictions. The farther, the more complex and nonlinear the subject is likely to be, and the greater the difficulty of precise predictions. No-one writes to discredit “the experts” and choses anecdotes about radar and sonar, the atomic and nuclear bombs, the jet engine, the moon landing, or GPS. GPS even uses Einstein’s bizarre relativistic predictions.
Those particular examples were not only right, but each of them relied on models before the practical proof could be seen.
I’m sorry. At this point, a witty comment about climate models would be the thing, but I don’t have one. I doubt my own civility in even posting things like this.
What can be seen
April 5, 201120110405
I have not written; or, I have written but nothing to put in public.
My father died seven weeks ago. Since in early December when we knew, until perhaps four weeks after, I wrote mostly about him, about myself, growing up, about my mother.
I reached a point where there was nothing more to write. The topic was exhausted. I’m skeptical of such things; sometimes the empty space disguises the more difficult cave beneath. So I pressed, returned, re-examined. But there was nothing there, nothing further. Loss of a father, loss of a childhood different than mine. In two ways: my childhood, that could have been different, had he been different; and loss of his childhood, so much harder than mine. Odd, but perhaps simply how it is: he never grew his antennae, having had them clipped and slapped so early. He gave me a safer home, to grow antennae in, that could feel difficulties by which he seemed (I presume, presumptuous) untouched, or not touching.
Quiet
March 6, 201120110306
I have not posted for three weeks. I have not been empty of thought, or feeling; this is an inflection point, of sorts, where memory is sifted and the soft only-partly-conscious decisions about what memories to nourish and what let desiccate are made. The labor of grief gives birth to my father, in memory.
Elegy for my father
February 21, 201120110221
Tonight we’ll have a dinner in my father’s honor, as much of a service as he’ll, or we’ll, have. He did not want a service. Here’s Dad on Mary R., written in ’98, at the end of a section on her increasing dementia. They lived together from’82 until her death.
She likes and compliments guests. Wonders why every other woman in the world hasn’t grabbed me first. Pays no attention to my occasional sighs at one of her mis-activities, and offers gentle, constant affection. She’s been this way all the years I’ve known her.
If a man knows he’s been loved—simply loved—then death becomes a buffoon. To be obeyed when the time comes, welcomed, or annoying. But it doesn’t matter, really. Laughable. A cloud of chaff to disappear into, upright, solid, smiling.
